


Responsible

by Aliana



Series: Do No Harm [9]
Category: Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Anachronistic, Gap Filler, Gen, Gondor, Minas Tirith, Third Age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-18
Updated: 2012-03-18
Packaged: 2017-11-02 02:59:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/364257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aliana/pseuds/Aliana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fíriel eats a donut and meets a junkie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Responsible

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to LiveJournal in summer 2006. A gapfiller to [Fallen](http://archiveofourown.org/works/364151/chapters/591380).

Fíriel is in charge of one, two, three triage shifts in a row. It's not the decisions that she minds; they are so easy for her now that she can choose without thinking, sleepwalk her way through case after case, blood and entrails and severed limbs, yes and no and maybe. It's the second-guessing of the young workers that is going to be the death of her. They don't trust themselves— _is he really…? Are you sure…?_ —and so they fall back to her, and this is what is going to kill her, the collective weight of everyone falling back at once. Yes, that's a black tag, my dear. And that one, too.

This is what she tells Valacar as they stand on one of the garden balconies.

"I'm always the one," she says. There's not even a trace of a whine in her voice, but simple fact; the tiredness has steamrolled everything out. "It's me, always."

"It's because you're the responsible one," he replies, taking a drag on his cigarette.

She drops herself forward to slump against the railing, lets herself languish there. It's a slightly melodramatic gesture, but they're allowed to be melodramatic now and again; it's one of their last remaining luxuries. Even the sky doesn't look quite real; it's like an oil painting, Fíriel thinks, like the backdrop for a stage-play.

She says, "What if I don't want to be the responsible one?"

"You might be out of luck, then, darling."

"Yeah. Whatever."

When Fíriel gets to the dispensary, Elloth is wringing her pretty manicured hands and fretting. Someone's been into the morphine stores, she's sure of it, she says. And even before she can think, almost, Fíriel's putting a reassuring arm around the girl's shoulders and saying the magic words:

"Don't worry, I'll look into it."

*

When Fíriel was a kid, she ate what she could, when she could, end of story. That was the way it was for everyone on the shabby side of the second circle; food of any quantity or quality was a special occasion. Now the war has come and the proportions are all wrong; most days the triage has taken her appetite, and real hunger, when it comes, is the gift. That's how it is today, and she drifts through the kitchens thinking carefully about what her supper will be. Her child-self is lurking somewhere in the shadows next to the ovens, giggling behind her hand at this ridiculous woman who is wandering slowly through well-stocked siege pantries, savouring her stomach pangs.  
  
She settles on a cheese sandwich made with two thick slabs of rye. It's not bad; the cheddar is the real stuff, too, not the plastic-wrapped junk you get at the supermarket. She eats and then walks down the corridor nibbling on a doughnut for dessert when she spots the man she must be looking for, hunched into a dark little cul-de-sac. He's just brought the needle away from his arm, and when he sees her staring, he just smiles at her, without even the decency to look guilty or panicked.  
  
"You," she begins, the remainder of her doughnut still in her hand. "Might I ask what you are doing, please?"  
  
He just stands there, grinning like an idiot. He's a young guy, almost boyish-looking, snub-nosed and long-lashed, wearing—for shame, she thinks—officer's stripes.  
  
"You need to give me an answer," she says. She takes another bite out of her doughnut before she realizes just how unprofessional this looks, though it's not like this fellow will have anything to say to her about decorum. "Or I will report you to the Warden of these Houses immediately."  
  
"Has anyone ever told you," says the guy, "just what an exceptionally attractive woman you are?"  
  
"Oh, for Christ's sake. Just please give me that and come with me, all right?"  
  
His grin smile stretches even more tightly across his clean-shaven face, and he makes a strange little noise in his throat, and then he bolts in the opposite direction.  
  
" _Security!_ " she shouts at the top of her lungs. "Somebody get that guy!"  
  
He's nearly disappeared at the end of the gloomy corridor when she hears yelling, a sound of impact. And now he's coming towards her again, more slowly, escorted by a pair of Guardsmen. Gondor's finest, she thinks.  
  
"This your man, ma'am?" asks the Guardsman to the officer's left. She knows this Guardsman (can't remember his name, not quite), and even though she's pretty sure he's Minas Tirith born and bred just like she is, he's somehow inherited this slight drawl that always makes her feel as though she's in a Tennessee Williams play. Particularly when he starts calling her "Ma'am," and the word rocks gently back like a dinghy bobbing in a harbour.  
  
"It is, sir. Thank you very much. I have reason to believe he's been raiding the morphine supplies in the dispensary."  
  
"That so," drawls Tennessee calmly, and he casts a sidelong glace at their suspect. Faced with such a stinging indictment, the other man can only hang his head.  
  
Fíriel sits with him in the lobby of the Citadel lockup, most of which has now been allocated for temporary siege-emergency office space. There's only a tiny corner left of the once-majestic and imposing marble reception; the rest of the hall has been chopped up into tiny drudge-worker cells with cheap cubicle dividers. Tennessee's behind the desk at the other end of the room, busying himself with some paperwork; in a little while he'll call her over to take her statement. "You sure you want to sit here next to him, ma'am?" he asked earlier, to which she just nodded with a smile, and that was that. In her blue healer's uniform, she's as sweet and unassailable-looking as a saint. No one except the Warden will ever tell her what to do. One of the perks of the job; the others, right now, she can easily count on the fingers of one hand.  
  
She's pretending to skim through a three-year-old magazine that she picked up from the table beside her. The guy ignores her for a few minutes, then leans over towards her. His wrists are in handcuffs in front of him, and his breathing is shallow and slow.  
  
"Can I see?" he asks.  
  
"No," she says, and turns away from him. "You know," she says, without looking up from the pages, "there are a lot of patients here who actually  _need_  that morphine. Actually physically need it." She turns her head to look at him.  
  
He blinks once, slowly, those camel-lashed eyes. "So do I," he says.  
  
"Men who are wounded," she says. "Very badly."  
  
"I am," he says.  
  
She looks him up and down, almost theatrically, but understatedly so. She's a method actor. "You seem okay to me." He opens his mouth, and she says, "And don't go like this, either." She lifts her hands and cups them over her heart. "Don't say you're wounded in here, because everyone is. And it's getting old."  
  
"No," he says, and whips out that stupid strung-out smile again. "I was just going to say that I meant it, what I said before. You are a tremendously attractive woman. You have a lovely bone structure and…there is a definite air of refinement about you. I can see it."  
  
"I used to be a prostitute," she replies. "And not a particularly expensive one, either."  
  
He is silent for a moment, and then he says, "Oh, all right." And then he giggles.  _Giggles_ , with a weird little lilt in his voice at the very end. Occasionally she will say these types of things to total strangers because they never believe her. She supposes that this is a good thing in the long run. And did he just say something about her  _bone structure_?  
  
"I don't suppose you want to know what happened? With me?" he's saying. He's speaking slowly, as though he doesn't care; just another day at the beach, she supposes.  
  
"Let me guess. You had a very painful long-term wound, spent some time in a field hospital. And the morphine just made everything better, made everything so much easier. And then the wound healed up but the need was still there, like a scar. Am I right?"  
  
He considers this for a second, then says, "Wow. You're good. No wonder they hired you."  
  
"Actually they hired me because of my exquisite bone structure."  
  
Another pause. "Really?"  
  
"Sure, why not." She flips the page in the magazine. "This your first time getting caught?"  
  
He nods. His eyes are wide and his skin is flushed.  
  
"You're a commissioned officer?"  
  
He shakes his head. "NCO."  
  
"At least you can't lose your commission, then. You'll get demoted, probably."  
  
He nods again, resigned.  
  
"Normally we could help get you clean, but there's the siege on. Understand?"  
  
"Yeah." He shakes his head. "Just…what about my guys, you know? The ones that are left, that is."  
  
She shuts the magazine and regards him. "Well, maybe you should have thought about that before," she says, not unkindly. It's not a reproach; all of her disapproval has been worn out of her. It's only an observation. And he knows it too, he picks up on it.  
  
"Yeah. Maybe."  
  
And what does it matter, she wonders for a second or two. Let him go back to his guys, back to his unit. It couldn't possibly make things any worse, at least not much. Forget about it, Sir, she might say to the Tennessee Guardsman. It was a mistake. It was just his insulin which he has legally acquired. In my professional medical opinion. And then she would drift back into the steady red hypnosis of the triage and she would forget about it. What's the point?  
  
The point is, she realizes, that she's the responsible one.  
  
"There's a lot of people like me out there," her guy is murmuring. He's staring off into space, at some nonexistent horizon. "Just…kind of coasting on it. It's tough." A shallow breath, in and out, skimming the surface. "It's tough out there." Not an excuse, just an observation, like hers.  
  
"I know."  
  
"Ms. Fíriel?" Tennessee says from his desk at the other side of the truncated lobby. "Ready for your statement now."

*

"An officer?" Valacar's drumming his fingers in a staccato rhythm on the balcony rail. He's become a little bit fidgety ever since he got rid of his cigarettes. "Jeez."  
  
"Yeah, I know," Fíriel says. Something huge rams into the walls of one of the lower circles and the shockwaves ripple up to kiss the soles of their feet. She closes her eyes for a moment but does not flinch.  
  
"Gondor's finest, huh?"  
  
"Gondor's finest."  
  
"I'll bet Elloth's relieved."  
  
"Yeah, she was glad to hear they'd got him."  
  
"That  _you'd_  got him. You're a heroine."  
  
She can't tell if the pun is on purpose, but she doesn't acknowledge it in case it is. She thinks about the officer's wide-eyed euphoria, the spaced-out sad contentedness. Maybe she should have had some cereal for lunch, instead. A salad. She doesn't know when she'll be hungry again. The one good thing about addiction, she realizes, is that you know exactly what you need, when you need it. It instils an artificial sort of clarity in your life, so that you don't have to struggle for it yourself, you don't have to squint through the murk.  
  
"What do you think of my bone structure?" she asks, turning her head in profile to him.  
  
"Of what?"  
  
"My bone structure."  
  
He blinks. "Not bad, I guess."  
  
"Not bad? You guess?"  
  
"Okay, it's great. Cheekbones to rival Audrey Hepburn's. I don't know, what do you want to hear?"  
  
"That's why they hired me."  
  
"I think you've had one too many triage shifts."  
  
"It's because I'm the responsible one," she replies, and she turns on her heel and leaves him to stare out at the battlefields.


End file.
